Written by

Bill Goodykoontz
Gannett Chief Film Critic

Looking at the credits for "Gangster Squad," it was surprising to find that it wasn't based on a comic book.

It would have been fitting, because Ruben Fleischer's film, about the consolidation of power by the gangster Mickey Cohen in LA in the late 1940s and 1950s, plays like a live-action cartoon. But no, there it is, just a regular script by Will Beall, based on Paul Lieberman's non-fiction book.

The characters are clichés, particularly Cohen himself, played in absurdly broad fashion by Sean Penn. Sean Penn! The guy is a great actor. Here he seems to be doing a parody of a noir gangster, ready to ...